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To the argument touching relation we have an answer surely
legitimate:
The Unity is not of a nature to lose its own manner of being only
because something else stands in a state which it does not itself
share; to stray from its unity it must itself suffer division
into duality or the still wider plurality.
If by division the one identical mass can become a duality
without loss of quantity, clearly the unity it possessed and by
this destructive division lost was something distinct. What may
be alternatively present and absent to the same subject must be
classed among Real-Beings, regardless of position; an accidental
elsewhere, it must have reality in itself whether it be
manifested in things of sense or in the Intellectual- an
accidental in the Laters but self-existent in the higher,
especially in the First in its aspect of Unity developing into
Being. We may be told that Unity may lose that character without
change in itself, becoming duality by association with something
else; but this is not true; unity does not become two things;
neither the added nor what takes the addition becomes two; each
remains the one thing it was; the duality is predicable of the
group only, the unity remaining unchanged in each of those
unchanged constituents.
Two and the Dyad are not essentially relative: if the only
condition to the construction of duality were meeting and
association such a relation might perhaps constitute Twoness and
Duality; but in fact we see Duality produced by the very opposite
process, by the splitting apart of a unity. This shows that
duality- or any other such numerical form- is no relation
produced either by scission or association. If one configuration
produces a certain thing it is impossible that the opposite
should produce the same so that the thing may be identified with
the relation.
What then is the actual cause?
Unity is due to the presence of Unity; duality to that of
Duality; it is precisely as things are white by Whiteness, just
by Justice, beautiful by Beauty. Otherwise we must reject these
universals and call in relation here also: justice would arise
from a certain attitude in a given situation, Beauty from a
certain pattern of the person with nothing present able to
produce the beauty, nothing coming from without to effect that
agreeable appearance.
You see something which you pronounce to be a unity; that thing
possesses also size, form, and a host of other characteristics
you might name; size, bulk, sweetness, bitterness and other Ideas
are actually present in the thing; it surely cannot be thought
that, while every conceivable quality has Real-Being, quantity
[Number] has not and that while continuous quantity exists,
discrete quantity does not and this though continuous quantity is
measured by the discrete. No: as size by the presence of
Magnitude, and Oneness by the presence of Unity, so with Duality
and all the other numerical modes.
As to the How of participation, the enquiry is that of all
participation in Ideal Forms; we must note, however, that the
presence of the Decad in the looser totals is different from its
presence in the continuous; there is difference again in its
presence within many powers where multiplicity is concentred in
unity; arrived at the Intellectuals, there too we discover
Number, the Authentic Number, no longer entering the alien,
Decad-Absolute not Decad of some particular Intellectual group.
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